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EarthCube is motivated by the challenge of understanding the Sun-Earth system, which requires integrating diverse observational data across a range of instruments. A barrier is that specialized software tools are needed to interpret raw instrument data, and there is no platform for deploying these tools so that a community of systems scientists can develop and flourish in collaboration.

This challenge includes not only the technical problem of tool integration, but also the problem of attributing credit so that researchers will be motivated to share. To address these challenges we have concieved Integrated GeoScience Observatory (InGeO), a common processing platform to enable comparison and correlation studies involving multiple data types, and by extension, multiple disciplines.

As concieved, InGeO will integrate tools from the community, using a framework that incorporates two EarthCube Building Blocks: GeoSoft, from University of Southern California, to facilitate licensing and recording the ontology of software tools; and GeoDataspace, from the University of Chicago, to document workflow and to manage attribution of credit, through publication of data, data processing, and associated simulations. We envision a pilot program that enables assimilation of magnetometer data, radar data, and all-sky optical data. These data will be returned together on a common grid, and within a fully-tooled computing environment that allows further custom processing. The data and tools are to be provided through collaborations with Virginia Polytechnic Institute (radar data and processing tools); University of Calgary, Canada and Boston University (optical data and image unwarping tools); Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (magnetometer data), and the University of Colorado-Boulder and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, for incorporation of the well-known Assimilative Mapping of Ionospheric Electrodynamics (AMIE) data assimilation tool.

EarthCube is a collaboration between the Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (ACI) and the Geosciences Directorate (GEO) of the US National Science Foundation (NSF). For official NSF EarthCube content, please see: http://www.nsf.gov/geo/earthcube/.